Examples of table searches in a network switching unit include: hashing for a Media Access Control (MAC) address look up, Longest-Prefix Matching (LPM) for Internet Protocol (IP) routing, wild-card matching for an Access Control List (ACL) and direct memory access for control data.
Software Defined Networks (SDN) have emerged in the market. An SDN allows one to manage network services through an abstraction of lower level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forwards traffic to the selected destination (the data plane).
Table search is at the core of a flexible control path as seen by software. A switch performs a look up of each incoming packet and takes action as instructed by a search hit result or a default action as instructed by a table search miss.
Since table searches are critical to SDNs, it would be desirable to provide improved techniques for performing such searches.